Across China on Foot eBook

I am of the opinion that the Li-su may be closely
allied to the Lolo or the Nou Su, of whom I have spoken
in the chapters in Book I dealing with the tribes
around Chao-t’ong. And even the Miao bear
a distinct racial resemblance. They are of bony
physique, high cheek bones, and their skin is nearly
of the same almost sepia color. The Li-su form
practically the whole of the population of the Upper
Salwen Valley from about lat. 25 deg. 30’ to
27 deg. 30’, and they have spread in considerable
numbers along the mountains between the Shweli and
the Irawadi, and are found also in the Shan States.
Those on the Upper Salwen in the extreme north are
utter savages, but where they have become more or
less civilized have shown themselves to be an enterprising
race in the way of emigration. Of the savages,
the villages are almost always at war with one another,
and many have never been farther from their huts than
a day’s march will take them, the chief object
of their lives being apparently to keep their neighbors
at a distance. They are exceedingly lazy.
They spend their lives doing as little in the way
of work as they must, eating, drinking, squatting
about round the hearth telling stories of their valor
with the cross-bow, and their excitement is provided
by an occasional expedition to get wood for their
cross-bows and poison for their arrows, or a stock
of salt and wild honey.

Mr. Forrest, in his paper which was read before the
Royal Geographical Society in June, 1908, speaks of
this wild honey as an agreeable sweetmeat as a change,
but that after a few days’ constant partaking
of it the European palate rejects it as nauseous and
almost disgusting, and adds that it has escaped the
Biblical commentators that one of the principal hardships
which John the Baptist must have undergone was his
diet of wild honey. In another part of his paper
the writer says, speaking of the cross-bow to which
I have referred: “Every Li-su with any
pretensions to chic possesses at least one of
these weapons—­one for everyday use in hunting,
the other for war. The children play with miniature
cross-bows. The men never leave their huts for
any purpose without their cross-bows, when they go
to sleep the ‘na-kung’ is hung over their
heads, and when they die it is hung over their graves.
The largest cross-bows have a span of fully five feet,
and require a pull of thirty-five pounds to string
them. The bow is made of a species of wild mulberry,
of great toughness and flexibility. The stock,
some four feet long in the war-bows, is usually of
wild plum wood, the string is of plaited hemp, and
the trigger of bone. The arrow, of sixteen to
eighteen inches, is of split bamboo, about four times
the thickness of an ordinary knitting needle, hardened
and pointed. The actual point is bare for a quarter
to one-third of an inch, then for fully an inch the
arrow is stripped to half its thickness, and on this
portion the poison is placed. The poison used
is invariably a decoction expressed from the tubers